As a Wordpress Consultant and SEO, I’ve developed a unique 4 phase system that I use when working with clients to take them from where they’re at to online success. I decided to start this internship program last Fall as a test. I wanted to see if I could write my system out in a private web site for just the interns, and have them follow my directions to build out a new web site. They would start with an empty brand new domain with a default blank install of Wordpress and nothing more – and the rest would be up to them. I was looking for people with a working knowledge of Wordpress and basic understanding of online marketing.

These are the “phases” of my system:

Phase 1: Security and Indexing – This phase is what I call the “foundation”, because making sure your web site is secure and indexable by search engines is the foundation of all your online success. I would say that 98% of all 150 clients I had last year had insecure Wordpress web sites, and had no idea how to make them indexable by search engines.

Phase 2: Competitive Analysis – Most “online marketers” do some basic keyword research, but most don’t understand the difference between phrase, broad, and exact match – or know how to find keywords with lots of search traffic, but low competition. I also take these keyword phrases and look at the top 10 results in google for each so I can break down what the makeup of their authority is, and create an actionable plan to compete with them on the first page of google.

Phase 3: On-Site SEO – I call this phase “erecting the house on the foundation”, because we take the keywords from phase 2 and put them in the right places on the web site. Without the right keywords in the right places, what chances do you stand at getting good search listings?

Phase 4: Linkbuilding and Authority – This is where the rubber meets the road. Once your web site is setup to be indexed with the right keywords, without traffic it’s useless. Who wants a brand new store filled with products and no customers? This phase is all about how to create a long lasting and ongoing plan for building traffic and online authority.

So what happened here is Bill worked my plan for 4 months, he had to resign a month early for personal reasons. I can only imagine what he would have done with that last month had he been able to stay! Bills assigned site was “Best Gifts For“.

These are his accomplishments:

“Best Gifts For“.

• 47 posts
• 10 pages
• 46 comments
• 439 visitors/mo
• 1,264 pageviews/mo
• 326 indexed pages in google
• 85 pages indexed in yahoo
• 21 pages indexed in bing
• 13 article directory submissions
• 110 directory submissions
• 50 blog comments per week
• 2 out of 3 assigned keywords on the top of the 2nd page of google
• 11,153 backlinks in Yahoo (and growing every day)

I think what he’s done is nothing short of amazing, but it only shows that the only limits online are your own abilities and the amount of time you put in. In the next post I’ll reveal a few of Bill’s backlink building secrets. In the future, I will be opening up my 4 Phase System to everyone (once all the documentation is complete). Signup to my mailing list below so you are notified of the launch when it’s ready.

I’m using my interns to create an entire Online Marketing Course using the exact same principles and techniques I use with small business and corporate clients every day. If this sounds like something you’d be interested in, signup to my email list using the form below. I’m not going to spam you with crazy “magic bullet” and “list control” offers. I will only send you email every now and again about techniques and products I actually use (there’s a small handful), and later this year my Online Marketing Course when it’s available.

It has been just a little over a month. There has been plenty to learn and lots to do.

In the time since my last update, I have covered Phase 2 and Phase 3 of JT’s internet marketing course.

Phase 2 covers Competitive Analysis. To give you an idea, the topics covered:

What is Competitive Analysis?, Keyword Research, Identifying the competition, competitive intelligence gathering and Competitive Analysis wrap up.

I always thought keyword research meant looking up Google keyword tool or any other, researching keywords in your niche, looking up a few well ranking sites in the same niche to see what they are doing and using those keywords.

Yes that’s the crux of it but what JT taught us to do was so much more.

The site I am working on is www.traveldestinationsreview.com. I used the keyword tool to pick up keywords that have more than 5000 but less than 100000 searches. I end up with 3 main keywords. I then picked the top ten sites for each keyword and entered their names in a spreadsheet. I created 3
spreadsheets for all three keywords.

I researched their alexa rank, google rank and SERP and noted them down. I also noted down the number of backlinks, the site’s urls, title, heading and description. It took considerable time to complete the research on 30 sites but what it helped me achieve was get a good insight into what the
competition is doing, what I can replicate and what I need to do to get a high SERP – SIMPLY, HOW TO BEAT THE COMPETITION. This is one step I know I am never going to compromise upon. I also bookmarked all the thirty sites in 3 different folders that I created in firefox. Additionally, it helped me see what the other sites are doing, how they are designed and laid out etc. Gave me quite a few ideas. An additional bonus that comes with all that research.

I then used www.semrush.com and few other similar sites to research these 30 sites further – the keywords they are ranking for, where they are getting their traffing from etc.

Next was Phase 3 – SEO – Optimizing your site for Search Engine Results. This is the phase I have enjoyed the most.

I did a lot of reading. JT was also generous enough to send me a few good ebooks on the topic and I am still going through them.

I did know how to set up the site with the blog title and install the all in one seo plug in, however JT went over in detail in the lessons how to set up the plug in, the settings to use and why. I also learnt how to optimize my site content and use the keywords wisely, the importance of h1, h2 and h3
headings.

Through all of Phase 2 and 3 I also designed my site and have a halfway decent looking site. Feel free to take a look and comment. I would love to know what you think. Right now the content is spare but come back to visit. It’s the result of all my learning here.

www.traveldestinationsreview.com

Through all of this JT has always been there to provide support and answer questions.

I am now in Phase 4 and writing content. I agonize more and write less. But that’s an update for another day.

Talk soon.

- Anu

I’m using my interns to create an entire Online Marketing Course using the exact same principles and techniques I use with small business and corporate clients every day. If this sounds like something you’d be interested in, signup to my email list using the form below. I’m not going to spam you with crazy “magic bullet” and “list control” offers. I will only send you email every now and again about techniques and products I actually use (there’s a small handful), and later this year my Online Marketing Course when it’s available.

This is what she had to say:

Hello Everyone,

This is Anu back again with an update a week into the internship.
It has been quite a week – busy and informative.

Phase 1 was all about learning how to set up Wordpress properly, get it indexed and secure the site. Bill’s post on Phase 1 is detailed and I am not going to bore you by repeating everything.

What I would like to share with you is that While I knew how to set up Wordpress, set the permalink correctly, add the necessary plugins, I have always lacked the knowledge to secure the site properly and strongly. I knew enough to delete admin as user in Wordpress, set a strong password, change it frequently and even move the .htacess file. However,I never knew how to modify the .htaccess file to block hackers, trojans and viruses or set up the robots.txt file correctly. I also never knew about some of the security plugins and how to set them up correctly.

There is lot of information out there online but not much about securing your site well, how to do it and most importantly, why. I have normally pulled bits and pieces of info from all over but nothing comprehensive. JT has laid all that out on the internship site in a organized fashion. He was always available to answers questions or just to help. Oh, I did need his help …. spent a few frustarting hours getting locked out of Wordpress because of a plugin conflict and had to send out an SOS email. :). If you have not read JT’s security guide, go back and read it. There is tons of valuable information.

It has been a long week but at the end of it, have gained much knowledge that I did not have before.
I am now 3 days into Phase 2 – Keyword research and analysis etc but will leave that for another post.

- Anu

I’m using my interns to create an entire Online Marketing Course using the exact same principles and techniques I use with small business and corporate clients every day. If this sounds like something you’d be interested in, signup to my email list using the form below. I’m not going to spam you with crazy “magic bullet” and “google cash” offers. I will only send you email every now and again about techniques and products I actually use (there’s a small handful), and later this year my Online Marketing Course when it’s available.

Here’s LaShae talking about what she’s learned in Phase 2:

LaShae again, with an update on Phase 2 of the intern program.

In Phase 1 I talked about learning how to set-up a wordpress site so it readily ranks in the search engines and hopefully gets on the first page of the SERPS, so people find you. I also talked about how to make sure your Wordpress sites were secure, so when the search engines do begin ranking you and you’re getting traffic, your site loads quickly and is available.

So how do you get ranked on the first page of search results by the different search engines?

That is what Phase 2 – Competitive Analysis helps uncover.

The first thing to determine is which keyword phrase or phrases you want to rank for in the search engines. JT walks through the process in How to SEO. I used the same basic concept to locate 3 specific keyword phrases to target on my intern site.

Finding the keyword phrases for my site was decidedly more complicated due to the competitive nature of the CPA (Click Per Action) market I was entering.

So JT and I both located 3 keyword phrases each. After he put the phrases through the paces using a paid SEO tool (we’ll reveal later), he determined that our phrases would be extremely hard to rank for in the search engines. He then went on to locate 3 other keyword phrases using the same paid tool.

After the keyword phrases were decided upon, I began the full competitive analysis.

First, I completed an SEO competitive analysis, looking at rank on the first page of google search results, google pagerank, alexa ranking, backlinks, title, description, url and heading for each of the competitors on the first page of search results for each of the 3 keyword phrases.

There are tools, both paid and free, that can do this for you in an instant, but knowing how to do it manually is helpful. It provided me with information I would never get from a tool. It gave me an opportunity to view each of the pages in my browser and poke around on them looking at site design, layout, useability, appropriateness related to the keyword phrases, as well as the level of interaction and personality of the site.

Next I did even more competitive analysis this time for traffic statistics using free services online to learn how and where visitors were most likely coming to the site from and where they were going after leaving the site. I also looked at the demographics of the traffic – age range, income levels and education levels.

Using yet another free service, I learned that many of the competitors were using adwords to get traffic to their sites. And I learned whether they offered advertising directly on their sites and what the general ad sizes were on the sites.

Still, even with all this information, what did it mean for my assigned site?

Honestly not a whole lot, at first.

Initially it felt like information overload. And it was in many ways. However, without doing the competitor analysis, I might have spent months trying to find a way to get rankings and traffic in a niche that relies heavily on more than just SEO for traffic and conversions.

As it turns out, this niche is definitly suited to a long term plan far outside the scope of the 5 month intern program.

This sounds like a lot of time and energy to take researching. And it’s worth it to spend the time and energy up front, before spending any money, to figure out what the odds of ranking in the search engines are for your keywords.

Learning how to do both the data gathering and how to interpret the data is priceless and will certainly help me to use any paid tool I chose to use in the future.

What I know now about the CPA market is that it will take a year or more to unseat and outrank most of the sites in the top 10 on the search results pages, using an SEO strategy. That’s not unusual in the case of competitive and aggressive niches. It’s also not useful in meeting the objectives JT has set for the intern program.

It’s okay to change direction and it’s easier to do before money and months and months of time have been invested.

I specifically chose a market with lots of competition because I knew it would get JT to go deeper into his process and that means we all win in the end.

I learned how to chose appropriate keyword phrases to target. How to determine whether those keyword phrases are good or bad targets based on what other sites have done to target the same phrases. I learned how to determine the general source of competitors traffic and general demographic information about the visitors coming to their sites. I know how to do all this using free services to gather data. I also have a better understanding of how to interpret that data. The data doesn’t look or feel as overwhelming as it did before.

I’d say all in all Phase 2 is the most frustrating simply because it determines the strategy you’ll use for your site. And reading the data accurately truly determines if your strategy is destined for failure or success.

Since the internship is teaching interns how to make new sites profitable using SEO strategies, by the time you’re reading this I’ll have chosen another site to work on.

It will still be competitive enough to take JT deep into his mental knowledge databanks, while meeting the time constraints and strategy objectives of the intern program.

Stay tuned for the next update to see what happens.

LaShae talked about using different tools and methods for research, and one of the purposes for my intern program is document my 4 Phase program for success so later in 2010 I can make it available for anyone that wants to learn. If you’ve read any of my hundreds of posts on this site, you know my penchant not only for detail, but for complete and unabashed honest. I’m not one of those crazy IM gurus writing a 16 page emotional sales letter trying to hype and sell you on my “latest greatest” thing.

I’m using my interns to create an entire Online Marketing Course using the exact same principles and techniques I use with small business and corporate clients every day. If this sounds like something you’d be interested in, signup to my email list using the form below. I’m not going to spam you with crazy “magic bullet” and “google cash” offers. I will only send you email every now and again about techniques and products I actually use (there’s a small handful), and later this year my Online Marketing Course when it’s available.

A little about me. My name is Anu. Home is in a quiet neighborhood in the Northern Virginia suburbs of the DC Metro area. I am in my early forties and have two children. The oldest is 21. He finished college and joined the army and is now in Afghanistan. The younger one is 13 and in middle school.

Grew up in tropical India in a coastal city in the south and completed my education there with Masters’ in English Literature, HR Management and Application Development. I am a Management Consultant by profession and run my own consulting company.  We do all manners of projects that are HR related from the Fortune 500s to midsized companies.  I lived the consulting lifestyle with the long hours and constant travel until about the beginning of 2008. I decided I wanted a different lifestyle, one that would let me work from home and spend time with family. Since then I have taken a break from real work, one where I get dressed, get into a car and drive miles to sit down at client place and open up my laptop to work or attend meetings. I have spent the past couple years exploring options, considering a complete career change, one that would let me work from home.
Yes, my work is interesting and the money is very good. However I have done this for nearly 20 years and it is no longer the driving passion it once was. I would eventually like to get away from Management Consulting and make a full time income from my various blogs. (Wouldn’t we all? ;)

I have been exploring internet marketing and blogging now since 2007.  I am fascinated with the amount of knowledge that is out there. Reading is a passion, an obsession if you will and to me the internet appears to be this vast library of books. There are all these really wonderful blogs that are both informative and entertaining. What really surprises me is that people are making good money on the internet. I was raised with the notion that one has to excel at education to be able to have a profession that helps you make good money. The internet explosion and the successful bloggers that I have read about dispel that myth soundly.

Everything I know about internet marketing and blogging I learnt by surfing, reading and from forums. I love reading, writing, cooking, eco living and blogging and hope to combine my interests and begin a new career online. Of course, I will still have to pay the bills and keep the home fires burning, so I need to be successful at this or get back to being away from home 5 days a week.

The internship came along at the right moment. It interested me for various reasons. While I know how to install WordPress, tweak themes and plugins, write some PHP code and launch a good looking blog, I never really learnt or know well how to monetize. Additionally, all of this knowledge came from 3 plus years and hundreds of hours of surfing, reading dozens of books on the subject and breaking down any number of blogs and themes and rebuilding them again. I also know there is a lot more to learn in other areas as well before I can be successful. When I emailed JT a few days ago after stumbling on his blog, it was with the hope that I would be able to reduce this long curve and gain knowledge faster and have the opportunity to learn from someone who is successful at it.

Another thing that attracted me to this internship was JT’s obvious willingness to take on interns and give generously of his time. I have not seen much of that in my surfing and exploring online.

To everyone that is reading this, Good Luck with your own online journeys! Come back and visit, I will be posting updates regularly.
Cheers, Anu

You can track all her activities on the main Online Marketing Internships page.

Of course when you submit the articles it can take 3-5 days to get approved, and this challenge started on Jan 11th, but so far I only have 5 articles actually published – but more are pending review.

Here are the ones that have been published so far:

Article #100: eBay Quality Click Pricing Model: Good or Bad?

Article #99: Free Ways to Build More Backlinks

Article #98: Become a Blogging Good Samaritan

Article #97: How to Create a Checklist for Switching Themes

Article #96: What Did I do to Make Money today?

If you’re interested in taking part – it’s still not too late! Read my Original post about the HAHD challenge. Another great reference is my Guide to Article Marketing. Get writing!

Article marketing can generate massive amounts of authority and backlinks for your web site or blog. You can get more exposure, more traffic, and this is something you can do for FREE! I have a story I often tell about the largest diet affiliate program on Clickbank. Out of $12 million dollars paid out in the last year to affiliates, 95% of the commissions were paid to less than a few dozen people (from thousands of affiliates). When surveyed, the main difference between the successful and those that didn’t earn much – it was article marketing. Nearly all of the handful of successful affiliate marketers had performed article marketing to build links. The shocker is they all submitted from 100-500 articles EACH for their target sites!

Have you ever submitted 100 articles? Odds are you never submitted more than a dozen or more (if that) for the same project. I’ve had my Ezine Articles account for about 2 years now, and I’ve only submitted 40 articles in all. I’ve received over 99,199 views for them to date, imagine my exposure if I would have submitted 140?

I’m going to do it, I’m committing to the 100 articles in 100 days. Follow the link above to signup – blog about it, tweet about it, comment below about it – and follow my blog as I’ll be writing about it every step of the way!

Read my Guide to Article Marketing if you’re ready to get started! It will teach you all about how article marketing works, and the best ways to write and submit content!

Hi, I’m LaShae Dorsey and I’m one of John’s Interns at JTPratt.com and so far it looks like I’m the only female in the group.

I’m not new to computers as my high school was one of the first in the state to have a fully functioning computer lab, with a working modem and 15 Apple IIe’s. This was the mid 80’s so for us it was a really big deal. I learned BASIC and then graduated from high school.

My educational and professional background are varied. I’ve yet to complete my Bachelor of Art Degree, just a couple more classes to go. I’ve worked as a tutor and mentor, a tutor coordinator, a construction contract administrator and commissioning and inspection agent and if you asked them, most of my bosses wouldn’t hire me again, even though they appreciate what I did while I worked with them. Many of them are now good friends. They managed to recognize something I didn’t see, until recently, my skills are better suited to an ever changing landscape.

I am curious by nature and driven to know and learn, which is not always a good combination in the corporate world. I’m also developing my ability to recognize blessings, even when they don’t look so much like blessings.

I currently maintain two blogs and work with online newbies offering them hand holding and helping them understand how to bring their service or product into an online space. Plus I help them stay away from the scams. I also work with businesses as a website coordinator.

I’ve used Wordpress.com, Blogger.com and Wordpress.org since 2005 when I first learned about them. Now I’m slowly starting to increase my use of social networks like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Friendfeed. In fact if you google my name, those sites will come up before my blogs do.

If it sounds like my life is all about online business, that’s because it is. If I’m not in front of the computer, I’m reading something I think will help me work better in an online business and in life. If I’m not reading I’m interacting with other people and business owners at conferences. I’m always watching human nature, peoples buying habits and infommercials. YES, infommercials.

I might be just a little obssessed, but in a good way.

I have a really big dream and I know internet businesses are the very best way to make it reality.

The opportunities for us to support ourselves in non-traditional ways is right here in front of us, if we get the right help.

I found Johns’s blog back in September, while I was researching some plug-ins for a client. I spent almost 16 hours reading and note taking. I’ve implemented just a few of of the things he mentions on the blog and the intern program. I really like the results. If I’d known about him 2 years ago, you and I might not be having this little introduction.

I didn’t see the application until after Bill was introduced because I spent most of my time in the archives of the blog.

I’m glad I completed it anyway, just to see what would happen, even though it was weeks after he originally posted it.

I’m definitely excited to be learning, curious about doing and ready to share what I learn with you.

I’ll leave you with this. Never believe what other people think you can’t do.

LaShae Dorsey

It was about 2 weeks ago when I started with John here at JTPratt forums as an intern. I was assigned the site http://bestgiftfor.com, and the goal was to build it from scratch to Google first page ranking site, and learn as many new things as possible during the course of the site development. John is a great guy, and a great instructor. Even though I have spent an entire year already trying to learn the WordPress and everything else that goes with it, on my own, I knew that I would learn a whole entire another years worth of learning in a few months if I end up as an intern. And I was right about it. BTW, the last year that I spent learning on my own, was not quite really “on my own” as I had been a regular reader of JTPratt Forums and have learnt so many things from it already.

Well, anyways, I will get down to the point here and share some of the things that I have learnt in the last 2 weeks being an intern:

Site Analysis

John taught us (step-by-step) how to properly setup a WordPress blog so it is done right from the beginning. This is something so important that if not done right, all the effort of setting a site up can be a complete waste of time and energy, and money!

Site analysis was the step number one. Site analysis consists of setting up the robots.txt file, sitemap setup and proper way to submit to the search engines, RSS feeds setup, and the site security and search engine engine access control. Learning the robots.txt file basics and it’s use for site security and search engine access control was something that I was not very familiar with. Similarly the .htaccess file and the Robots Meta plug-in. John showed us in a few easy, but very useful steps on how to properly configure both these files, install them on the server, and then use the plug-in for fine-tuning. I know there is a lot more to learn, but I also know that whatever I have learnt so far is already way more than most professionals even incorporate in their blog setups, and the rest don’t even realize what they are missing out on.

What good would be a perfect site, especially if it is making money for you, and you do not even realize that someone else is using your hard work and making money for himself, for free! Just the thoughts about this gives me creeps now, and now I realize why it is so important that you secure your site at the initial setup time, before you put all the hard work into it. Just like a bank account. It has to be secure before you invest anything into it. And this is something that I would not have learnt on my own, until after getting robbed.

Also, using the above tools and scripts, we can enhance the SEO rankings by easily controlling the search engines’ ability to index and crawl – the way we want it! This is absolutely amazing. I always knew that there is a way to do this, but never imagined how easy and doable it really is. I was under the impression that you need to hire expensive super coders to hand-write the entire code for this for your site.

Competitive Analysis

Competitive analysis was the second step of setting up a WordPress site – so it is profitable and can compete even with the big guys. There was so much learning and teaching involved in this step that if I have to sit here and write everything about it here in this post, it will take hours. In a nutshell, John taught us both the manual and the automatic way to do the following:

• Keyword research – here we learnt how to properly research the keywords that can make us money! That simple. And no, we can not go with the instinct, :-). Instincts here would be a complete gamble.
• Identifying the competition – I never imagined that it is not the “gut feeling” but proper professional steps that will identify your site’s competition. How can you compete, and win, when you don’t even know who your competition is. And in this step we also learnt how to pick and chose the proper competition to go up against…obviously we can’t and we don’t want to compete with  just about everyone out there.
• Competitive intelligence data gathering – using competition’s source code, meta-data, site description and so many other things, like alexa rankings, yahoo backlinks etc.
• It’s funny how John showed us that we can either use a bunch of paid tools to gather all this data, or the free resources already available on the internet, and still get the same results. I like this approach of John. A true professional is never dependent on any one tool of trade.

In these 2 weeks I think I have learnt enough to put a lot of paid professionals to shame. And I can say this because I have hired and paid these kinds of professionals in the past, and I have experienced their work and results on my dime.

Now we are moving towards applying all that we have learnt so far to the actual site. And I am looking forward to all the exciting new things that I will be learning this coming week. Once again, I am grateful and feel very lucky to have landed this opportunity to learn from a true professional and a generous teacher.

My first couple weeks has been quite busy. Coming into this I knew it would be a lot of work, and true to that it is. I’m not complaining at all because I am learning a lot. Nothing worth doing is easy. And I will say, John is a patient man :-)

The first phase has been learning how to set a Wordpress site up properly for indexing, secure the sight from both rogue web bots and hackers, design considerations and the importance of a professional looking website, keyword research and understanding who your competitors are.

When I set up my personal Wordpress based sites I basically had an idea, picked out a theme, added some plugins and then started writing some posts. My sites did not have a robots.txt file, they weren’t secure and I assumed that by writing content they would get indexed over time. Which they have, but I’m learning things from John that I should have done early on that would have gotten them indexed quicker.

It’s very important to set your site up correctly for indexing as soon as possible. The robots.txt file is a simple text file that is used to tell web spiders (bots, crawlers) where they can go on your site. Good spiders, like Google, will obey the rules you’ve set forth in the robots.txt file and only crawl the sections you specify. However, there are many rogue spiders crawling the web whose sole purpose is to steal information. That information could be email addresses for spammers, personal information about you or your visitors, or to steal every bit of content you have on your site. Proper security measure need to be implemented to combat this. Nothing is ever 100% secure, but there are steps that you can take to block many bad spiders and hackers.

The .htaccess file is another security measure you can use. You could spend weeks or months trying to learn about .htaccess files. I knew absolutely nothing about them before signing on as an intern. I now at least know the .htaccess file can be used to stop known rogue bots, leechers or hackers from gaining access to your site. The main take away being it can be used to block “known” baddies. I like to think of it like a reverse guest list. If your name is on the list, you are not allowed into the party. If you’re name is not on the list, you’re welcome to come in. So you need to ensure you always keep your .htaccess file updated with the latest known rogues. The .htaccess file can also be used in the wordpress admin directory to limit access to known IP addresses. This allows a double security measure. Believe it to not people do try to hack into your Wordpress admin directory. And if you were like me before this class you didn’t have a very secure password. So use secure passwords and implement IP filtering if possible.

One item that I’ve known for a long time and we’ve been discussing to a small degree is site design. A good site design is critical to your project. If you expect to keep people on your site you better have a professional looking theme. Personally when I’m visiting a site, if the design is not professional I won’t stay on that for even 30 seconds. If you can’t take the time to make your site look good and test it on all the major browsers then don’t even bother. People will not be interested. There a literally thousands and thousands of free Wordpress themes. Many are very good, many are not. If you can’t find a free one that fits the design goal, you may have to buy one or hire someone to make it for you. Sometimes you have to spend money to make money. And speaking of design, don’t throw ads up for the sake of having ads. If you find an ad that is related to what you’re blogging about then by all means use it. But in a tasteful, unobstrusive way. Many people will leave a site because there are too many ads, even if the site is professional looking.

Keyword research is key – how many times have you heard that? Do you know what keywords people will be using to reach your site? Is or will your site be optimized for those keywords? Have you done research on those keywords to prove their viability? After our site was assigned and we had set it up for indexing and secured it, we were shown how to do keyword research. How to start out with a general keyword phrase and then drill down and find the keywords that actually get a good number of searches each month. This is one area that I thought I knew something about, but turns out I didn’t really. I wrote down a number of keyword phrases that I thought for sure would have a high number of searches. Turns out I was very wrong. Some of my keyword phrases got zero searches per month. Most got less than 20. It can be quite intensive and time consuming, but it’s very important to the success of your site. For now we’ve used only free tools like Google’s keyword tool. I know there are many paid keyword tools available, but we have not done anything with them.

Competitive research is another topic we’ve discussed. In my 8 – 5 job I do a lot of competitive research and report my findings back to the marketing team, sales team and engineering team. In the world of internet marketing you are all of those teams. You need to understand who your competition is, where their traffic is coming from, what their PR is, how do they rank in the search engines, what keywords are they using, do they have back links and if so are they quality back links, who are they affiliated with and anything else you can learn about them. The better you know your competition, the better equipped you will be to rank higher than they do when somebody searches for your particular keywords. We’ve learned to use some free tools to help us gather some of this information. Alexa, Semrush, Quantcast and Siteanalytics helped us gather some important information about the competition. But we also looked at their meta descriptions, meta keywords and header tags as part of our intelligence gathering effort. As I stated above, the more you know about your competition, the better equipped you will be to beat them.

I’ve just hit the highlights of what we’ve been working on over the past couple weeks. We have gone into much greater detail on each of the topics I mentioned. I’ve certainly learned that my SEO skills, keyword research skills, website security skills and competitive data skills were severely lacking. By no means am I an expert at any of those now. That takes time and practice, just like any other new skill you learn. But I at least have the foundation now to build upon. I’m looking forward to the next phase.

- Bill